it's saturday morning, i'm wearing a cream teddy jacket and buying iced coffees and walking home. and elvis is playing in the hallway and there's cleaning fumes in the kitchen and we're using every single magnetic letter in the alphabet on our fridge to spell out things that matter to us.
and i'm learning lines and changing my bed sheets and i'm unsubscribing to emails and charging my vibrator and it's all very very gentle and i am very very grateful
why is it when you use the term 'addict' people don't trust you?
that is perhaps a rhetorical question because i know why. i do. but i have agency. i should be able to feel how i choose to feel about letting go of 16 months of sobriety for four days. i should be able to decide how i feel about that.
a little sad and vulnerable? yeah. but sobriety is the only way for me to go because i turn into a different person when i drink. i don't care about anybody around me, i only care about the next glass and i hate that. sobriety and recovery has been the best thing i've ever done in my life.
but i'm in my fucking twenties! i'm an intelligent thoughtful young woman who pulled herself out of a cycle and made a brand new one. i'm proud of myself. and i'm not beating myself up over what happened. i don't see it as a big dark sad relapse.
i was so BORED. i was so fucking bored. i was boxed into a routine of school and washing and food shopping and going home alone and not going out. and it turned into a pressure cooker and i drank. and i'm not going to continue. and i don't see why i should feel shitty about that just because people are worried.
i am so deeply appreciate of everyone who loves me enough to worry. i am so so deeply grateful. but i want to be able to feel how i feel. i want to be able to say without being told i'm in denial or i'm really sad deep down that i was just fuckin' BORED and made a dumb decision.
tomorrow is week 4 of term 6. i'm curled up on the sofa in a big pink sweatshirt, drinking a green tea and under a blanket. term is intense - we're in six days a week, the workload is a lot and i feel fucking exhausted today. but it's going really really well and i feel really good. exhausted but good. it's only 2.30 but so far i've already:
practising the art of being alone without being lonely. i was a regularly little artist in my teens, even my early twenties. i was alone but i was with myself all the time. i had time to waste in between my starbucks shifts. i was making up stories in my head, i was writing them down, putting songs into playlists, cutting up magazines, pasting them onto my bedroom walls like the walls of my heart. i was staying up til 3am listening to music, falling down rabbit holes to find out Elvis’ favourite sandwiches and sexual appetites, the nutshell miniature dioramas of unexplained murders. all that alone time is good for the soul when you fill it with yourself and all the things you love to fall into, to dream about, to explore, to listen to over and over. here’s to alone time, spent with yourself 💌
